The Battle for Britain: Interservice Rivalry Between the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, 1909-1940 - Hardcover

Cumming, Anthony J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1612518346 ISBN 13: 9781612518343

Publisher: Naval Institute Press, 2015

Synopsis

The book is a short review of British air and naval power from 1909 -1940 and represents an attack upon “independent” airpower. When Bleriot became the first man to fly the English Channel in a heavier-than-air flying machine in 1909, it seemed to mark the beginning of a fundamental decline in British attitudes towards maritime defence. Exploiting prevalent invasion paranoia, press baron, Lord Northcliffe invited distinguished writers such as William Le Queue and H G Wells to write articles on the theme “We are no longer an Island”.

Bleriot’s exploit encouraged the politicians to reassess how Britain would be defended in the future. An important government committee heard evidence that led directly to the forming of the Royal Flying Corps – an organization that initially included army and naval wings. Superficially, the Royal Navy was moving from strength to strength as it expanded in the naval arms race with Germany. The service remained in high public esteem but a section of the ruling Liberal party wanted money diverted for welfare – a new and powerful competitor for funds. The Two-Power Standard was quietly dropped in 1909 and the astronomical costs of battleship building forced the Navy to look for cheaper substitutes such as submarines and aircraft. A forceful critic of naval expenditure, Winston S. Churchill fostered the early development of airpower when he became First Lord in 1911 and continued to do so when out of office.

The German air raids of 1917 panicked the wartime government into making an ill-considered merger of naval and army air arms that supported imaginative but untried theories of airpower. In 1938, a later government submitted to the national psychosis of bombing by allowing the Royal Air Force to be the only service to rearm without regard to the nation’s ability to afford it. In 1940, the contribution of the Royal Navy was minimized as Churchill praised the RAF for saving the nation from invasion in the Battle of Britain. As a result the RAF’s story has achieved an iconic status that is part of British national identity.

Consequently, more important operations including the Dunkirk evacuation; Battle of the Atlantic; Battle of Mers El Kebir and the naval operations against the Italian fleet have been underrated and misunderstood. This ultimate justification of independent airpower continues to undermine understandings of maritime defence and may have skewed US and UK defence policies in the wrong direction for decades.

About this title

Review:

"Cummings offers an outstanding account of how inter-service conflict played out before, during, and after the Battle of Britain. His careful analysis of the brutal bureaucratic fights between sailors, civilians, and aviators leads inexorably to his final question: 'What is the purpose of independent air power?'"--ROBERT M. FARLEY, author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force

"Anthony J. Cumming's thought-provoking book sheds new light on the British government's hasty decision, taken after the Smuts Report of 1917, to create an independent Air Force that came to influence every aspect of British defense policy between the wars. He describes how the untested theories of a few air power protagonists which literally forgot the importance of sea power and failed to give due credit to the hard-won wartime experience of the RNAS and RFC were accepted with insufficient study by politicians. Cumming stresses the undoubted bravery of the aircrew but explains how these misplaced priorities hampered the development of carrier-borne aircraft for the Royal Navy and limited British operational capability in the opening phases of the Second World War."--David Hobbs, author of British Aircraft Carriers: Design, Development and Service Histories

"Cumming's analysis can genuinely be said to break new ground in explaining the reality behind events that were described, for whatever reasons, in ways that distorted public perceptions and which still have an influence on defence policy in the UK and Australia today. I thoroughly recommend The Battle for Britain."--Australian Naval Institute

"Cumming has laid down a powerful challenge to the orthodox narrative of British air power in the early years of World War Two. By tracing the politics, the inter-service maneuvering and propaganda which accompanied the transition of the Royal Air Force from its origins in a crisis during 1917 to being lauded as the savior of the nation in 1940, Cumming exposes both the hysteria of public perceptions and the distortions it created in defense policy--the ramifications of which are still being felt today."--Richard Harding, editor of The Royal Navy, 1939-2000: Innovation and Defence

"Anthony J. Cumming's book examines the rise of airpower in the inter-war period and the competition for resources between the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. This vital passage of history has been subject to much myth making, especially by the champions of airpower. Cumming dispels the myths, and challenges the accepted views, in a provocative and challenging analysis. This is a good book, and an important one."
--G. H. BENNETT, professor of history, Plymouth University

"An insightful assessment of the often negative role of the RAF in the development of British air power." - The NYMAS Review

"This book argues that the interservice battle between the navy and air force between 1909 to 1940 was decisively won by the air force as early as 1917." - The Historian

"...this book is a definite buy for libraries and specialists in military and naval aviation. Its value lies in the author's distillation of the mass of civilian sources underlying decisions and the addition of the dimensions of media for affecting policy. The work provides a rounded picture of issues around air and naval forces that are likely to remain with us for the foreseeable future."--The Northern Mariner

About the Author:

Anthony J. Cumming, after a career in the British civil service, earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Plymouth in 2006, UK. That year, he also won the University of London’s Julian Corbett Prize for Research in Modern Naval History. He lives in Devon, UK with his wife and pet greyhound.

About this edition

• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1612518346
• ISBN 13: 9781612518343
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240